An Election For The Ages

Tell me how old you are, and I’ll tell you who you’re voting for

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I first wrote about the “Generation Gap” shaping the Democratic Primary for New York City Mayor in April, with an eye towards an eventual showdown between former Governor Andrew Cuomo and Queens assemblyman Zohran Mamdani. Since then, the race has not only climatically narrowed to Cuomo versus Mamdani with five days remaining, but the generational divide has only widened — even more significantly than I previously envisioned.

With six days of Early Voting behind us, Millennials and Zoomers are showing up at the polls in record numbers, according data from the Board of Elections; an excellent sign for Zohran Mamdani. Indeed, the democratic socialist’s path-to-victory is heavily reliant upon unprecedented participation from historically “low propensity” young voters, something even Bernie Sanders struggled to execute upon. However, Mamdani’s youth movement was always a better bet than the political class gave him credit for. College-educated voters under the age of forty-five — politicized and polarized by the Obama, Trump, and Sanders eras — were rarely given a stake in local politics, let alone aggressively courted by a moment-meeting, mass communications apparatus (macro) layered with a voter contact operation lacking modern precedent (micro). For years, this cohort represented a Sleeping Giant, teeming with untapped potential, but largely overlooked beyond a handful of neighborhoods in Western Queens and North Brooklyn. If harnessed correctly, said voting bloc could supercharge a citywide coalition in a future Democratic Primary. Far sooner than many anticipated, that day has come: for Zohran Mamdani has realized said potential. Now, this cohort is wide awake, and threatening to topple the political establishment.

However, the ethnography of “the young voter” in New York City often lacks nuance. The Astoria Artist. The Park Slope Polyamorous Couple. The Greenpoint Gentrifier. The Bed-Stuy Boyfriend.

In the interest of transparency, I am guilty of this as well (to an extent); largely because these neighborhoods have experienced the most pronounced transition over the past decade. The Commie Corridor has proven its political mettle, electing self-identified socialists at the city, state, and federal level. Furthermore, the progressive professional class is well-represented in media and cultural spaces; with commodified Brooklyn as the epicenter. Inevitably, many of these caricatures are of white hipsters or affluent families.

Mamdani’s undeniable success with this cohort creates a narrative quandary: a coalition of professional class transplants pitted against working-class, native-New Yorkers. The reality is far more complicated.

According to Marist College, Mamdani now leads Cuomo among Hispanic voters by five points, a twenty-six percent swing in the past month. Per Data for Progress, one of the few pollsters to include an Asian crosstab, Mamdani was outpacing Cuomo by twenty-two percent among Asian voters. Unsurprisingly, the Latino and Asian electorates (both remarkably diverse with respect to ethnicity and national origin) are among the youngest demographic groups in New York City. Furthermore, most reside outside of The Commie Corridor & No Kings territory; living in Parkchester, Woodside or South Ozone Park (among dozens of other neighborhoods). A mix of immigrants and native-born New Yorkers, their day-to-day lives exist outside the traditional lens of the media class. Whatsapp and WeChat are used to talk politics with family and friends; not Signal and Twitter. Many are not “triple prime” voters, subsequently ignored by the consultant class. Entire neighborhoods are written off; the product of lower rates of citizenship, which snowballs into fewer registrants, mediocre engagement, and less-than-stellar voter participation.

Zohran Mamdani has done the opposite, investing considerable resources in activating, not only college-educated Millennials in the city’s gentrifying inner ring, but also working-class natives in outer borough immigrant neighborhoods. Unsurprisingly, many Asian and Latino communities experienced the most pronounced shifts towards Donald Trump last November — fueled by a mix of voter apathy, the War in Gaza, inflation, and quality of life backlash. In the wake of this reckoning, few Democrats had any answers; as the fallout devolved into an intra-party knife fight. Mamdani’s “breakout” moment was a viral video, filmed on Fordham Road in the Bronx and Hillside Avenue in Queens, where the democratic socialist asked working-class Trump voters Why; and how Democrats could win them back. Mamdani’s answer has been a compelling costs-of-living message, disseminated via ethnic press, multi-lingual videos, dedicated events, and a volunteer army approaching fifty-thousand — all in the native tongue of New York City’s mosaic. The thread uniting Mamdani’s base (White, Latino, Asian) is Generation. And, unlike the native-born electorate, the Generation Gap that traditionally accompanies voter turnout is less pronounced among the city’s Asian and Latino communities, owing to higher rates of citizenship among the second (and younger) generation of immigrants.

“If you’re under 30, you weren’t even born the last time Andrew Cuomo voted here.” Age is not just a number.

Andrew Cuomo’s prohibitive lead with the Black electorate cannot be reduced to one factor alone. In the relationship driven world of politics, Cuomo is known. The former three-term Governor has a wealth of personal contacts, spanning his five decades in public life, across every Black neighborhood in the five boroughs. At a moment's notice, Cuomo can summon any labor leader, pastor or tenant association president: his calls will always be returned; and no Black church will turn him away on Sunday. After alienating Black leaders — who lined up behind one of their own, Carl McCall — during an ill-fated run for Governor in 2002, Cuomo diligently courted Black leadership, which paved the way for his ascension. Across each of his three campaigns for Governor, Cuomo’s support from Black voters was resolute. Similar to Eric Adams, who ran-up-the-score in Black neighborhoods against his more liberal rivals — low-income Brownsville, working-class Wakefield, middle-class St. Albans — Andrew Cuomo, the moderate with plans to hire five thousand more police officers, ubiquitous on television at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, has overwhelmingly led among Black voters in every public poll. In spite of all this, age cannot be overlooked. The Black electorate remains the oldest (on average) of any racial demographic in New York City. In every Black-majority Assembly District, more than forty-percent of the electorate is over the Age of 65.

Nonetheless, this dynamic is not solely confined to the Black community. Cuomo performs best, across the board, where older voters exert the most influence (the Upper East Side, Staten Island, Southern Brooklyn, Eastern Queens). Many of these New Yorkers have the city home for decades, residing in outer borough neighborhoods that rarely experience residential turnover. Their personal history, rooted in the tumultuous 80’s and 90’s — racial violence, bull markets, record crime — shaped their political outlook. David Dinkins, the city’s first Black Mayor, remains revered to this day across Harlem, Southeast Queens, and Central Brooklyn; a soft-spoken gentleman elected to quell racial unrest, expelled from office too soon due to a whitelash familiar to many Black New Yorkers. Whereas others, particularly affluent Manhattanites and Outer Borough white ethnics, reserve their nostalgia for the days of Ed Koch and Michael Bloomberg.

However, many of the aforementioned “Cuomoland” neighborhoods (save for the wealthiest corridor of the Upper East Side) are all white ethnic, right-trending regions, armed with increasingly few votes to dispense in a Democratic Primary (just ask Andrew Yang). Of course, Cuomo can run-up-the-score there, but his margins in older Black neighborhoods will be what makes-or-breaks the former Governor’s comeback bid. What should concern Andrew Cuomo is that, were Mamdani’s under-45 support to transcend race and class, the insurgent’s “floor” would be raised in many districts and neighborhoods the former Governor needs to win BIG.

Cuomo has consistently bled support among young-trending demographics, nowhere more so than Latino and Asian voters; while nonetheless maintaining his iron-clad hold on the Baby Boomer electorate.

To be clear, there are two noteworthy exceptions. Despite his prowess with Millennial and Gen-Z voters, some of Mamdani’s best avenues to increase his vote margins versus Cuomo come from “No Kings” Gen-X and Baby Boomers on Manhattan’s West Side and Brownstone Brooklyn, some of the most vote-rich neighborhoods in New York City. Whereas Cuomo is expected to remain the prohibitive first choice of many Hasidim and Orthodox Jewish sects, who historically engage in bloc voting (for whomever the local rabbis endorse) to maximize their electoral influence. What might be surprising to many is that these Hasidic and Orthodox communities are among the youngest enclaves (in terms of population and voting electorate) in the five boroughs.

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After six days of Early Voting, I am confident that Zohran Mamdani is ahead, with respect to the ballots that have already been cast.

Having spent months chasing the ghost of Andrew Cuomo, trying to come within striking distance of the overwhelming frontrunner, Mamdani has not only caught the former Governor — but surpassed him.

When the polls close on Sunday, the final day of Early Voting, voter turnout will have surely eclipsed 300K ballots, and Mamdani’s lead may be in the tens of thousands entering Tuesday.

For nine months, Zohran Mamdani has not only surpassed expectations, but shattered them. Armed with fifty thousand volunteers amidst extreme temperatures, Mamdani would only have to hold on for another sixteen hours.

Andrew Cuomo knows this. The Early Voting data, which shows voters under 44 comprising almost half of the electorate (those 25-34 have cast the most ballots thus far), should make him nervous. An imminent heat wave, where temperatures are set to reach 100 degrees on Tuesday, also poses a threat to Cuomo’s older coalition. As such, the former Governor has demanded that Mayor Adams and the Board of Elections install air conditioners at the seven hundred or so polling places currently without them. The Cuomo campaign, a skeleton of an operation, has relied heavily upon “Fix The City,” the frontrunner-aligned Super PAC. Having carpet bombed the airwaves and inundated mailboxes across the five boroughs, almost exclusively with anti-Mamdani messaging, the PAC is now astroturfing get-out-the-vote, spending almost half-a-million dollars on paid canvassing.

Who needs volunteers when you have a blank check?

Come Tuesday, “Fix The City” will have spent more than twenty-five million dollars on the Democratic Primary. While Mamdani has inoculated himself from such attacks amongst his ever-expanding base: the many voters who have come to know (and like) the insurgent; this avalanche of fear mongering has blitzed the mediums where older voters congregate (namely, broadcast television). The concern for Mamdani is that Cuomo’s eleventh hour spending spree, a relentless onslaught of mail and TV, will reach older voters at the perfect time. More so than appealing to any “moderate” ideology, or drawing upon voters' relationship to Cuomo, these advertisements remain potent for their ability to negatively define Mamdani, over-and-over-and-over again, to those who don’t already know him, statistically the oldest voters.

Some may be tempted to say that, even if Zohran Mamdani loses, he will have assembled the “Coalition of the Ascendant,” the youngest generations of New Yorkers (White, Hispanic, and Asian) whose populations are only growing; in contrast to the Cuomo coalition of older generations (Black, White Ethnic), which are hemorrhaging population. Indeed, one could easily forecast a Mayor Cuomo vs. Rep. Mamdani rematch four years from now; and cast Zohran as the favorite purely off of demographic trends, let alone the political gravity that will inevitably weigh down Cuomo. If only it were that simple.

Andrew Cuomo, for all of his intuitional advantages, remains an unbelievably flawed candidate, one who has run a dreadful campaign. On the precipice of historic defeat; even in victory, Cuomo could claim no mandate. Better candidates, capable of seizing the center-left technocrat lane (unclaimed in this race), such as Jessica Tisch, are on the horizon. Potentially on the ballot in November, the City’s Charter Revision Commission may propose “Jungle Primaries,” that, if passed, would significantly alter (for the worse) the progressive left’s path-to-victory at the citywide level. The Super PAC era, annihilating the airwaves, is here to stay. This cycle, they spent $25M against Mamdani. What’s to prevent that number, absent intervention from the Campaign Finance Board, from being $100M next time, let alone in this fall’s General Election. Nor may macro political conditions, oftentimes the most overlooked component, be so uniquely ripe for Democratic insurgency.

It’s now or never.

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